The purpose of looking at flux data from Ameriflux for the Harvard Forest tower (Ha1) was to understand annual patterns of the ecosystems photosynthetic potential and occurring respiration rates within the temperate mixed forest; observed data was collected for every year from 1991 to 2016. Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) rates was used to quantify for the given night dataframe (nee.night) to determine the variable rates of NEE on an annual basis.
Methodology used to determine respiration in regards to temperature required for use of the creation of a dataframe to store monthly parameters (parms.Month), writing a function to fit the model and extract parameter values from nee.night, writing a loop to fit monthly curves and add parameters to the parms.Month dataframe, and error estimation by use of bootstrapping.
The observed site was Harvard Forest, NEE data taken from Harvard Forest tower Ha1, located at Lat/Long 42.5369, -72.17266.